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Post by Deleted on Dec 5, 2021 21:38:54 GMT
And we trust them to release her if we give them £400m?
And we don’t think effectively paying a hostile government to release hostages sets a precedent?
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timmullen1
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Post by timmullen1 on Dec 5, 2021 22:03:54 GMT
And we trust them to release her if we give them £400m? And we don’t think effectively paying a hostile government to release hostages sets a precedent? The answer to your first question is yes, Americans, Australians and IIRC a New Zealander have all been released after the settlement of historic debts. No it doesn’t set a precedent as the validity of the Iran’s claim to the debt has been recognised in UK law and once paid Iran would then lose its leverage. It can’t properly be compared to a hostage/ransom scenario. We cannot preach to the government of Iran about complying with international law whilst at the same time acknowledging that we are in breach of it. |
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Post by Deleted on Dec 5, 2021 22:11:01 GMT
And we trust them to release her if we give them £400m? And we don’t think effectively paying a hostile government to release hostages sets a precedent? The answer to your first question is yes, Americans, Australians and IIRC a New Zealander have all been released after the settlement of historic debts. No it doesn’t set a precedent as the validity of the Iran’s claim to the debt has been recognised in UK law and once paid Iran would then lose its leverage. It can’t properly be compared to a hostage/ransom scenario. We cannot preach to the government of Iran about complying with international law whilst at the same time acknowledging that we are in breach of it. Food for thought. Thank you for the reply. I just find it hard to trust and deal with what to my mind is one of, if not the most, repugnant regime in the world. (The Taliban may in time come to rival that but for now…) Admittedly I would not be a good diplomat. |
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Post by No Offence Alan on Dec 5, 2021 22:15:55 GMT
The answer to your first question is yes, Americans, Australians and IIRC a New Zealander have all been released after the settlement of historic debts. No it doesn’t set a precedent as the validity of the Iran’s claim to the debt has been recognised in UK law and once paid Iran would then lose its leverage. It can’t properly be compared to a hostage/ransom scenario. We cannot preach to the government of Iran about complying with international law whilst at the same time acknowledging that we are in breach of it. Food for thought. Thank you for the reply. I just find it hard to trust and deal with what to my mind is one of, if not the most, repugnant regime in the world. (The Taliban may in time come to rival that but for now…) Admittedly I would not be a good diplomat. The "trust" issue is the other way round at the moment because Trump reneged on the previously agreed deal. |
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Post by greenchristian on Dec 5, 2021 22:19:05 GMT
The answer to your first question is yes, Americans, Australians and IIRC a New Zealander have all been released after the settlement of historic debts. No it doesn’t set a precedent as the validity of the Iran’s claim to the debt has been recognised in UK law and once paid Iran would then lose its leverage. It can’t properly be compared to a hostage/ransom scenario. We cannot preach to the government of Iran about complying with international law whilst at the same time acknowledging that we are in breach of it. Food for thought. Thank you for the reply. I just find it hard to trust and deal with what to my mind is one of, if not the most, repugnant regime in the world. (The Taliban may in time come to rival that but for now…) Admittedly I would not be a good diplomat. Why does a regime believing and doing things you consider repugnant make you consider them to be untrustworthy? |
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Post by Adam in Stroud on Dec 5, 2021 22:28:16 GMT
And we trust them to release her if we give them £400m? And we don’t think effectively paying a hostile government to release hostages sets a precedent? These are fair points, John, but the point I am making is that we have owed the money since before 1979. Nazanine Zaghari-Radcliffe had barely been born, let alone arrested. To tie it in as a condition to her release is dubious not only on the grounds you cite but because we simply owe the cash to Iran for blatant non-delivery of a contract for goods and have been messing about with excuses for decades. I think it would be reasonable to tie it to a nuclear deal, because both elements of that would be about the parties agreeing to respect the norms of international law and deal in good faith, which is essential to arms limitation treaties even if you loathe the other side (e.g. SALT, START etc). If we could make progress on that we might hope to get Zaghari-Radcliffe back as a side issue of no lasting importance to either country's foreign policy, but important to HMG's role as protector of British citizens. The problem with accusing Iran of hostage-taking is that the history of both the £400m and of bad-faith use of raw power doesn't begin with Iran taking hostages to extort money to which they have no right (like Somali or other pirates) it begins with blatant British imperialism and without in any way wanting to act as an apologist for Iran, it is frankly hypocritical to pretend otherwise and seen as such by other parties (not just Iran.) |
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Post by Adam in Stroud on Dec 5, 2021 22:34:51 GMT
Food for thought. Thank you for the reply. I just find it hard to trust and deal with what to my mind is one of, if not the most, repugnant regime in the world. (The Taliban may in time come to rival that but for now…) Admittedly I would not be a good diplomat. Why does a regime believing and doing things you consider repugnant make you consider them to be untrustworthy? A fair distinction - a key point in the rise of the Mafia is that while utterly repugnant they were highly trustworthy - if they said they would stop your neighbour giving you grief you could be sure they would, and if they said they'd cut you balls off of you didn't pay the agreed fee for that then they'd certainly do that too. But I've read that for centuries Iranian governments have been notoriously hard to trust, they have a different view of the morality of lying in the cause of the greater good. |
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Post by tonyhill on Dec 6, 2021 6:36:08 GMT
The Iranians have little reason to trust us. We extracted wealth from their country in the form of oil allowing their people to remain impoverished for fifty years, and when they finally tried to redress the balance engineered a coup to impose a government that would allow us to continue to rip them off. Fortunately for Iran we failed.
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neilm
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Post by neilm on Dec 6, 2021 9:07:58 GMT
The Iranians have little reason to trust us. We extracted wealth from their country in the form of oil allowing their people to remain impoverished for fifty years, and when they finally tried to redress the balance engineered a coup to impose a government that would allow us to continue to rip them off. Fortunately for Iran we failed. The 1953 coup only really failed by the mid 70s, no? |
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The Bishop
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Post by The Bishop on Dec 6, 2021 10:13:25 GMT
And of course Western regimes backed the discredited Shah to almost literally the last moment, rather than accepting the need for change.
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carlton43
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Post by carlton43 on Dec 6, 2021 11:10:15 GMT
And of course Western regimes backed the discredited Shah to almost literally the last moment, rather than accepting the need for change. The Shah was not discredited and we should have maintained him in power by all means necessary including stringing up the ayatollahs as a signal statement, and supporting the moderates and the atheists. And we should have cracked down on OPEC by force if necessary. A personal threat to the safety of the ruling regimes and ruling families would have sufficed. We really missed all the tricks in that two decades when we could have stamped out change, saved huge numbers of lives, masses of property and shedloads of money by denying Islam the power and the cash to subvert half of the developed world. A sad disaster. Caused for all the wrong liberal reasons as usual. |
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Dec 6, 2021 11:30:07 GMT
The case for backing the Shah is actually better in retrospect. Although the Shah ran a repressive regime, the assumption outside government was that overthrowing it would probably lead to a basically democratic structure which would look somewhat like a Western European country. This was wishful thinking. In reality, the Ayatollah Khomeini had much better organisation and was able to squash democracy and introduce a style of government that was no more democratic than the Shah and a great deal more restrictive of personal liberty.
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ibfc
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Post by ibfc on Dec 6, 2021 11:33:29 GMT
The case for backing the Shah is actually better in retrospect. Although the Shah ran a repressive regime, the assumption outside government was that overthrowing it would probably lead to a basically democratic structure which would look somewhat like a Western European country. This was wishful thinking. In reality, the Ayatollah Khomeini had much better organisation and was able to squash democracy and introduce a style of government that was no more democratic than the Shah and a great deal more restrictive of personal liberty. It can be argued that the Shah’s policies made Iran appear more Western than it was and hence Westerners thought removing him would automatically result in a liberal democracy. This mistake has been repeated many times by the West later also. |
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Post by andrew111 on Dec 7, 2021 11:03:13 GMT
And of course Western regimes backed the discredited Shah to almost literally the last moment, rather than accepting the need for change. The Shah was not discredited and we should have maintained him in power by all means necessary including stringing up the ayatollahs as a signal statement, and supporting the moderates and the atheists. And we should have cracked down on OPEC by force if necessary. A personal threat to the safety of the ruling regimes and ruling families would have sufficed. We really missed all the tricks in that two decades when we could have stamped out change, saved huge numbers of lives, masses of property and shedloads of money by denying Islam the power and the cash to subvert half of the developed world. A sad disaster. Caused for all the wrong liberal reasons as usual. Sounds a bit like the Crusades policy that worked out so well... The reality is that intervening in other countries in all the ways you mention, especially "by force", has worked out badly for the West in pretty much every case since WW2. (well, I guess Korea was a score draw) |
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carlton43
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Post by carlton43 on Dec 7, 2021 12:33:27 GMT
The Shah was not discredited and we should have maintained him in power by all means necessary including stringing up the ayatollahs as a signal statement, and supporting the moderates and the atheists. And we should have cracked down on OPEC by force if necessary. A personal threat to the safety of the ruling regimes and ruling families would have sufficed. We really missed all the tricks in that two decades when we could have stamped out change, saved huge numbers of lives, masses of property and shedloads of money by denying Islam the power and the cash to subvert half of the developed world. A sad disaster. Caused for all the wrong liberal reasons as usual. Sounds a bit like the Crusades policy that worked out so well... The reality is that intervening in other countries in all the ways you mention, especially "by force", has worked out badly for the West in pretty much every case since WW2. (well, I guess Korea was a score draw) Yes Andrew, I do understand and fully empathize with that general line of analysis. It is, in diplomacy, always a matter of the art of the possible, clarity of intent and action, firmness and resolution, coupled with subtlety and nuance. So often the West has havered, procrastinated, avoided, ignored and pretended, instead of delivering an early and decisive killer punch. We so often deploy the very worst form of moral and ethical ineptitude, shallowness and false positioning. We pretend all nations are essentially good and with good intentions and that we must not interfere, and that we must assist them to self-determination and to the state of political perfection in an open, liberal, plural democracy. Whereas an actual majority do not like or want that at all. Many in Britain don't want that. I am one of them! With the early days of Soviet Union Russia and incipient Nazi Germany, we should have brought instant effective brutal blunt force to crush them utterly whilst they were younger and weaker. Grinding them down later by attrition and hot and cold warfare is so very much more costly. A surgical sweep into Russia to kill out 10,000 of the leading communists and it would have been over forever. The same in Germany. A swift brutal occupation and the stringing up of a couple of thousand and it would have been over with a weak and manipulated Weimar Republic maintained by the occupation. In the Middle East we should have maintained the rulers and assisted them to repress both liberal and Islamic fundamental movements in order to maintain our stability and cheap oil, quite as much as to aid them. Keep the area quiescent. That is always the objective. And damnation to notions of fairness, bringing them to modernity and democracy, introducing liberalism and letting the public achieve their desires. None of that works at all well and it is always far too expensive and dangerous for us. We need always to single-mindedly run everything everywhere purely and entirely to suit us. And for want of clarity I define us to be the right thinking anglophone world and lesser European world view. I am not really very invested in democracy as it so often results in a mess and stupidity because it puts power in the hands of the ignorant, the stupid and a large body of people with no knowledge or interest in politics or diplomacy. My standpoint is just this. Would I like to be treated in a hospital run as a democracy, or place savings in a democratic bank, or to buy a vehicle made by a democratic factory? No, No and NO! |
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J.G.Harston
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Post by J.G.Harston on Dec 7, 2021 12:38:06 GMT
The Shah was not discredited and we should have maintained him in power by all means necessary including stringing up the ayatollahs as a signal statement, and supporting the moderates and the atheists. And we should have cracked down on OPEC by force if necessary. A personal threat to the safety of the ruling regimes and ruling families would have sufficed. We really missed all the tricks in that two decades when we could have stamped out change, saved huge numbers of lives, masses of property and shedloads of money by denying Islam the power and the cash to subvert half of the developed world. A sad disaster. Caused for all the wrong liberal reasons as usual. Sounds a bit like the Crusades policy that worked out so well... The reality is that intervening in other countries in all the ways you mention, especially "by force", has worked out badly for the West in pretty much every case since WW2. (well, I guess Korea was a score draw) Yet, all the right-thinking "progressives" insist that we forcibly tell the fuzzy-wuzzies how to run their countries:
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Post by matureleft on Dec 7, 2021 13:06:37 GMT
Sounds a bit like the Crusades policy that worked out so well... The reality is that intervening in other countries in all the ways you mention, especially "by force", has worked out badly for the West in pretty much every case since WW2. (well, I guess Korea was a score draw) Yes Andrew, I do understand and fully empathize with that general line of analysis. It is, in diplomacy, always a matter of the art of the possible, clarity of intent and action, firmness and resolution, coupled with subtlety and nuance. So often the West has havered, procrastinated, avoided, ignored and pretended, instead of delivering an early and decisive killer punch. We so often deploy the very worst form of moral and ethical ineptitude, shallowness and false positioning. We pretend all nations are essentially good and with good intentions and that we must not interfere, and that we must assist them to self-determination and to the state of political perfection in an open, liberal, plural democracy. Whereas an actual majority do not like or want that at all. Many in Britain don't want that. I am one of them! With the early days of Soviet Union Russia and incipient Nazi Germany, we should have brought instant effective brutal blunt force to crush them utterly whilst they were younger and weaker. Grinding them down later by attrition and hot and cold warfare is so very much more costly. A surgical sweep into Russia to kill out 10,000 of the leading communists and it would have been over forever. The same in Germany. A swift brutal occupation and the stringing up of a couple of thousand and it would have been over with a weak and manipulated Weimar Republic maintained by the occupation. In the Middle East we should have maintained the rulers and assisted them to repress both liberal and Islamic fundamental movements in order to maintain our stability and cheap oil, quite as much as to aid them. Keep the area quiescent. That is always the objective. And damnation to notions of fairness, bringing them to modernity and democracy, introducing liberalism and letting the public achieve their desires. None of that works at all well and it is always far too expensive and dangerous for us. We need always to single-mindedly run everything everywhere purely and entirely to suit us. And for want of clarity I define us to be the right thinking anglophone world and lesser European world view. I am not really very invested in democracy as it so often results in a mess and stupidity because it puts power in the hands of the ignorant, the stupid and a large body of people with no knowledge or interest in politics or diplomacy. My standpoint is just this. Would I like to be treated in a hospital run as a democracy, or place savings in a democratic bank, or to buy a vehicle made by a democratic factory? No, No and NO! Setting aside the moral issues (quite a big set-aside!) there's a fundamental practical problem that Suez illustrated in painful terms. To achieve what you want requires the active engagement of the USA. You imply that "the West" could have been, or even could still be, some homogenous bloc. For much of the 20th Century the USA was at best ambivalent and often hostile to UK attempts to build or manipulate a world to our ends. That's occasionally because of their claimed "city on a hill" strategic purpose, but more often because their interests simply didn't coincide with ours. |
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carlton43
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Post by carlton43 on Dec 7, 2021 13:12:13 GMT
Yes Andrew, I do understand and fully empathize with that general line of analysis. It is, in diplomacy, always a matter of the art of the possible, clarity of intent and action, firmness and resolution, coupled with subtlety and nuance. So often the West has havered, procrastinated, avoided, ignored and pretended, instead of delivering an early and decisive killer punch. We so often deploy the very worst form of moral and ethical ineptitude, shallowness and false positioning. We pretend all nations are essentially good and with good intentions and that we must not interfere, and that we must assist them to self-determination and to the state of political perfection in an open, liberal, plural democracy. Whereas an actual majority do not like or want that at all. Many in Britain don't want that. I am one of them! With the early days of Soviet Union Russia and incipient Nazi Germany, we should have brought instant effective brutal blunt force to crush them utterly whilst they were younger and weaker. Grinding them down later by attrition and hot and cold warfare is so very much more costly. A surgical sweep into Russia to kill out 10,000 of the leading communists and it would have been over forever. The same in Germany. A swift brutal occupation and the stringing up of a couple of thousand and it would have been over with a weak and manipulated Weimar Republic maintained by the occupation. In the Middle East we should have maintained the rulers and assisted them to repress both liberal and Islamic fundamental movements in order to maintain our stability and cheap oil, quite as much as to aid them. Keep the area quiescent. That is always the objective. And damnation to notions of fairness, bringing them to modernity and democracy, introducing liberalism and letting the public achieve their desires. None of that works at all well and it is always far too expensive and dangerous for us. We need always to single-mindedly run everything everywhere purely and entirely to suit us. And for want of clarity I define us to be the right thinking anglophone world and lesser European world view. I am not really very invested in democracy as it so often results in a mess and stupidity because it puts power in the hands of the ignorant, the stupid and a large body of people with no knowledge or interest in politics or diplomacy. My standpoint is just this. Would I like to be treated in a hospital run as a democracy, or place savings in a democratic bank, or to buy a vehicle made by a democratic factory? No, No and NO! Setting aside the moral issues (quite a big set-aside!) there's a fundamental practical problem that Suez illustrated in painful terms. To achieve what you want requires the active engagement of the USA. You imply that "the West" could have been, or even could still be, some homogenous bloc. For much of the 20th Century the USA was at best ambivalent and often hostile to UK attempts to build or manipulate a world to our ends. That's occasionally because of their claimed "city on a hill" strategic purpose, but more often because their interests simply didn't coincide with ours. Understood. I contend that our vital and basic interests nearly always overlap and coincide, but that poorer and more shallow reasoning and low level ephemeral politicking intervenes, often because of the demands made by pandering to democracy and attempting to please the stupidest and largest part of the electorate, especially in America. |
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Post by East Anglian Lefty on Dec 7, 2021 15:07:18 GMT
I don't know why we're so keen not to re-pay the £400m. There's no legal argument that we don't owe it AFAICT and we are supposed to favour the rule of law and to want Iran to enter into some sort of binding agreement over nukes. I don't see why we aren't at least willing to throw settlement of the debt into the pot of any deal over nuclear weapons, and to publicly say so. I think we are willing to repay it in principle, but the government’s claim is that their legal advice is that to do so would breach UN (and, probably more importantly US) sanctions thereby bringing further penalties on our trading relationship with Washington. It had been hoped that Biden would be more amenable to turning a blind eye, but that doesn’t appear to have come to fruition. Though Obama got round that problem by paying the Iranians a ransom in cash, so solutions do exist. |
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Post by timrollpickering on Dec 7, 2021 15:41:52 GMT
Louie French took the oath yesterday: [0]=AZUqCtBaDrxYN6dCMSfpPtqzFfpjA0BPhwvv0F6alu2EZFlqxTY5rOkovA_HJLEUMvn2fQIxUO3yXDg48YNtDTAuD5P7FBKmgLkGSzhEwDCnJ1EHiaxYjQZITc_beJCLPx9ocfTN6YY3IUTpHeiBjGwvJWxl99aPG3Wuil0oRHtdCw&__tn__=%2CO%2CP-R |
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